A. James Gregor: Nationality

“On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 141

War , Faith , Problem , Time

“Not only has capitalism not entered into its final crisis anywhere in the world, but Fascism was first successful in marginally industrialized Italy—in a nation that had only begun its industrial development. Italian industrial capitalism was hardly at the end of its life cycle. It was at little more than its commencement. Moreover, subsequent movements elsewhere in Europe that have been characterized as fascist proved to 'have been most successful in mobilizing lower classes in underdeveloped… countries.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), pp. 18-19

Life , World , Success , Country

“We are left with a budget of paradoxes. Given the seeming logic of the proposed classification of right-wing polities—with nationalism, hierarchical political structures, and charismatic leadership as defining properties— both fascism and Marxism-Leninism would seem to be political products of right-wing extremism. Should that be the case, the revolutions undertaken by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were all right-wing endeavors.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 5

“Whether their ideological commitment was to proletarian communism, or the Nordic race, or the restoration of Italy to its proper place in the community of nations, they all chose the hierarchically structured, charismatically led single party state to pursue their ends—a state first fixed in the political doctrine by Fascism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Marxism, Fascism & Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism, (2008), p. 313

Communication

“What some of the revolutionary syndicalists proceed to do was to identify the ‘communality’ of man not will class, but with the nation. The first intimations of a ‘revolutionary nationalism’ made their appearance among the most radical Marxists.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 55

Communication , Appearance

“In his Table Talks, Hitler spoke of the eventual ‘elimination’ of those Germans who did not meet ‘Nordic’ criteria of racial purity. The fact was that according to Hans Guenther, Nazi Germany’s ‘racial scientist', ninety-five percent of Germans did not meet those criteria. It was no longer clear who would suffer in the serious implementation of National Socialist policy.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 182

Suffering

“Socialization was, in fact, the product of a maturation of trends already implicit in the earliest Fascist formulations. The trend that matured into socializations was already manifest by the time of the Second Convention of Syndical and Corporative Studies, held in Ferrara in May 1932. Its substance was provided by the persistent socialist and anti-bourgeois biases of radical national syndicalism conjoined with the totalitarian pretensions of neo-idealism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 293

Study , Time

“Fascism... was the socialism of ‘proletarian nations.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 135

“As have been indicated, many Fascist theoreticians, throughout their active political lives, acknowledged the affinities between Fascism and Marxist-Leninism. There were even Italian Marxist-Leninists--including Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of his nation's Communist Party--who conceived of Fascism as the only viable form of Marxism for economically retrograde communities.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 168

Communication

“It was Stalin, Lenin’s unnatural heir, who ‘in the early 1930s…injected the adrenalin of Russian nationalism into the Soviet political bloodstream’ in an effort to restore some vitality to what gave every appearance of a failed revolution.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 176

Effort , Appearance

“Mussolini’s Fascism was a relatively benign form of reactive nationalism—in terms of the regime’s treatment of its domestic population. In the years between 1926 and 1932, when Fascism was establishing its totalitarianism, the special Fascist tribunals for political offenders pronounced only 7 death sentences.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 174

Death

“For Fascists, the state, animated by a profound sense of unity, was understood to be the ‘educator of civic virtue, rendering citizens conscious of their historic mission.’ Italy was to be Fascist, and Fascism was to be Italy. The nation was to be one indissoluble union; the interest of each was to be the interest of all. By 1929, what had emerged from the Fascist revolution was an unmistakable variant of the Gentilean neo-Hegelian state.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, (2001), p. 62

Education , Sense , Animals

“Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the twentieth century.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 191 (footnote 26).

“Mussolini's revolutionary nationalism, while it distinguished itself from the traditional patriotism and nationalism of the bourgeoisie, displayed many of those features we today identify with the nationalism of underdeveloped peoples. It was an anticonservative nationalism that anticipated vast social changes; it was directed against both foreign and domestic oppressors; it conjured up an image of a renewed and regenerated nation that would perform a historical mission; it invoked a moral ideal of selfless sacrifice and commitment in the service of collective goals; and it recalled ancient glories and anticipated a shared and greater glory.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), p. 99

People , Change

“Every element of Fascist doctrine can be traced to the belief system of revolutionary national syndicalism as that syndicalism emerged from the First World War.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, (1979), p. 119

War , World

“Mussolini himself, before he knew who would collect around the standards of the new Fascist Republican Party, committed himself to the realization of the original syndicalist and neo-idealist program of Fascism. His original intention was to call his new republic the Italian Socialist Republic—which nonetheless advertised itself as the vehicle of an Italian socialism, a national socialism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 307

“As early as 1930, Fascist theoreticians had begun to speak of an internazionale fascista, a pan-fascist union of kindred have-not or proletarian, nations. By 1935, Fascist maintained that Fascism recognized that the ravages of war and depression in Europe could only be undone by international ‘antiplutocratic’ reconstruction and argued, as a consequence, that Fascism was to be both ‘patriotic and international at the same time.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 356

War , Time

“Stalin, in turn, transformed Marxism into a rationale for national socialism… Leon Trotsky was equally quick to condemn the advocacy of socialism in one country, a commitment which further eroded classical Marxism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 359

Country

“What distinguished Gentile’s Fascist rationale from that which came to characterize the legitimating rationale of Marxist-Leninism was Gentile’s identification of the nation—rather than the ‘proletariat’—as the community of destiny that would shape our time. For Gentile, proletarians represented only component elements of a larger organic community: the nation. In the modern world, only the nation could provide the material, intellectual, political, and moral environment in which the individual might find fulfillment.”

A. James Gregor

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 100

World , Communication , Time

“[Italian] Fascism was a variant of classical Marxism, a believe system that pressed some themes argued by both Marx and Engels until they found expression in the form of ‘national syndicalism’ that was to animate the first Fascism.”

A. James Gregor

Source: Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, (1979), p. xi

Animals